I wanted to let the demurrage world know about a couple of exciting features we, at HubSE, have added to our Claims Management System recently.
Our aim is make the life of the demurrage analyst easy by taking out some of the admisitrative work to save time so that they can get on with the job of negotiating claims, advising their charterers, traders and operations colleagues on where demurrage can be saved (or maximised if you are an Owner) in the future.
I am particularly impressed with our technical guys when it comes to two areas – data entry and demurrage calculation.
Data entry – I have always found that keying in data that is already held in a system somewhere else to be a complete waste of time, and prone to error. My typing is not quickest or most accurate but at least with words I can use a spell checker. Numbers are a different matter. It is so easy to key the wrong number even if you are copying it down. It’s much easier to get automatic feeds. In the demurrage world we are forever keying in dates and times of in port events and these can easily be imported from other systems.
What is more impressive for me is the drag and drop feature in CMS. If you’ve got times in a spreadsheet, and many agents will send a spreadsheet if you ask, just drag and drop the spreadsheet against the port record in CMS. The system reads the spreadsheet and enters the data into the timesheet before your very eyes all ready for you to do your laytime statement.
The next step. Having got the dates and times of key events in the system we have now developed automatic calculators for different contracts. For example if you know your fixture is on Asbatankvoy we tell the system and it will do a first cut of the calculation based on NOR plus six hours to hoses off and look for any relevant deductions. Any set of rules can be programmed in by our team and this will give you a head start in assessing whether demurrage has been incurred.
Of course auto calculate does not replace the skills of a demurrage analyst as CMS won’t know of any amendments to the recap or won’t necessarily be aware of all the delays in port unless they are listed in the CMS timesheet, but just think how much time you could same.
To see this feature in action please contact me for a no obligation demo phil.stalley@hubse.com